ELECTRIC WORD
Q:
I work in a casual tech setting and I’m shocked by how much everyone swears. Should I say something? BY JON MOOALLEM
Imagine what it was like to be a Puritan in 1642. You’ve come to America. The landscape is crude and endless; the soundtrack, all hissing insects and howling wolves. “Everything about the place seemed godforsaken,” writes the natural historian Tim Flannery in his book The Eternal Frontier. That lawless emptiness is why you’re here—it means freedom. But in all free and empty places, there’s also room for wickedness to grow. Everybody in your little settlement is aware of this, which is why they panic when, one day, someone happens upon a young man named Thomas Granger having sex with a horse. It’s worse than you thought: When confronted, Granger rapidly admits he’s also had intercourse with three cows, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. This behavior is so savage—and feels like such a threat to the ethical society you’re laboring to build there in the wild—that you respond with a campaign of ruth-
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CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
less cleansing. You round up each animal Granger has had sex with and force the young man to watch while you slaughter it. (Not the turkey, though; for some reason, Flannery notes, no one bothers with the turkey.) And since you can’t tell which of the village’s sheep were the particular sheep Granger penetrated—his descriptions are imprecise— you herd every sheep in front of him, like a police lineup, and force him to ID the five in question. Then you kill those five sheep too. Then you kill Granger. Then you throw all their bodies together in one big pit. Now, fast-forward 373 years. Let’s talk about you. It’s easy to imagine you, hunched in your tech company’s open floor plan, forced to sit on an inflatable ball or perhaps issued one of those iconoclastic standing desks without a chair at all. You are a wary pilgrim on the wild, godless edge of America’s economic frontier. And, as such, you understand that the foul language your colleagues are using isn’t just unpleasant but morally precarious; if it continues unchecked, it could lead you all—your entire industry, really—to much darker places. You know, just as the Puritans did, that this kind of impropriety needs to be nipped in the bud.
